AN Andover football team is reeling after a nightmare weekend when the team was stranded in Basingstoke following a changing room raid.
Andover New Street Old Boys won their May Cup tie 2-1 against Oakley Athletic - but their joy turned to horror when they found a secure locker-room had been broken into.
The raiders removed car keys from the locker-room and used them to open two of the players' cars and steal wallets, cash, credit cards, two mobile phones and an expensive lap-top computer.
Manager Danny Mulberry and his players were stranded at the Newfound ground for two hours while they arranged for spare keys to be sent out and waited for a scenes of crime officer from Andover to arrive.
Danny said that in the meantime the thieves had used one of the cards to get more than £100 in cash-back payments from supermarkets. One of the thieves also tried to buy a flight ticket at a travel agent in Basingstoke but was foiled when a clerk became suspicious.
One of the players - full-back Geordie Lunn, who was actually on the subs' bench for the Saturday game - lost a total of about £2,450 in the raid including a mobile phone and a lap-top worth about £1,500.
Danny said: "I'm disappointed for the lads. The players we have this year just want to play for fun from time to time and this just spoilt the day."
Some players gave their valuables to Danny to put in a 'valuables bag' but others thought they were safe because they had locked their items away in their cars with the keys locked up in the secure changing room.
But the nightmare weekend had begun on Friday afternoon when club secretary Jim Dunn's Ford Mondeo broke down on the slip road leading to the A3097 off the A303. Jim is an invalid and it took him an hour to walk the mile back to his home in Bilbao Court. After a mix-up over his telephone number, he later found that the car had been removed on the instructions of the police.
It cost him more than £100 to get the car back, only to find that it was a write-off. "I'm as sick as a parrot," said Jim, who was not at the Saturday game. "It's definitely a weekend we don't want to go through again." A spokesman for Basing-stoke police said investigating officers were pursuing the possibility that at least one of the thieves was caught on CCTV when he tried to buy a ticket at Thomas Cook in the town centre. He said the inquiry was continuing and that nobody had been arrested for the offence.
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